Constant crashing after Cottage Living installation - please help!

[dslepenk]

Thank you so much for your suggestions - I wasn't sure if the mods are causing it, because in the past when I had issues with mods the game would crash very early on during gameplay. But what you are saying makes sense - and it also clarifies why maybe I was able to play for a few hours without any crashes. Basically the situation that triggered the mod and may have caused my game to crash may not have happened, is this correct? 

With this in mind, I'll try to take the mods out again and play for a while without them in game. I hope it's not the one that stops fires from happening because this was a massive bug for me; any time my Sims would be near a fireplace or a fire it would catch on fire (even if I had upgraded the fireplace). But my main suspicion is the one that prevents weird outfits from generating - my guess is maybe the game tried to generate a random Sim with an odd outfit and this conflicted with the code somehow. 

I actually played in the Magic Realm for a while during that game and no crashes occurred so I think you're right and it's probably not the mages. 

So I'll try a two-pronged approach: I'll continue removing mods and testing them, and I will also keep a careful log of what happens before a crash. Either I can get it to stop happening, or maybe post more information that can help us identify a cause. 

Thank you again for helping me. 

[puzzlezaddict]

@dslepenk  Yes, you're correct, or at least I also think that this is a case of a specific sequence firing at seemingly random times and causing the crash.

If you play with no mods and get another crash, upload the lastcrash file again, and I'll compare it to the others.  If the crash is the same, we'll know it's not due to your mods, and you can put them back in if you want.  I'll also try to find out more about that specific category, but that's difficult to do unless you've confirmed it's not mod-related.

[dslepenk]

@puzzlezaddict could you help me understand what is meant by a specific sequence firing? I'm not sure whether this would just refer to specific code or situations in the game, or something else. 

I think what I will do is remove the script mods that were in game when the game crashed and test what happens with them gone. This way I can playtest and still advance in my game - plus, I do think it's probably script mods because I would be surprised if CAS and build/buy CC were breaking my game so badly.

If I still get crashes, we'll know it's not the script mods and at that point I can remove build/buy and CAS CC. I want to avoid this option, because unfortunately I rarely get any free time lately and if I'm going to playtest I'd like to advance in my game if possible (I tried to take last weekend off to relax but ended up troubleshooting Sims the whole time!). Because I use a lot of CAS CC on my pre-made Sims and build/buy CC as well, I wouldn't be able to use my own save file with all mods gone. But of course if the issue persists I'm definitely willing to try it - just hoping I can isolate the offending script mod and it doesn't get to that point!

And if I still get the crash with all mods gone, we know there's something else causing the issue. This plan will probably take me a while because I'll have to find time to play, but I'll make sure to post updates along the way - especially if I find a fix. Does this sound okay from your perspective? 

And I know I've said it a million times, but thanks so much for helping me. It's really amazing to me that people who don't even work for EA are willing to spend their time to help complete strangers. The Sims (when it works) is a massive source of anxiety relief for me so getting this fixed is going to really help me at a time when I'm feeling very overwhelmed otherwise. 

[puzzlezaddict]

@dslepenk  What I mean by a sequence firing is just a progression of events within the game engine.  For example, your sim arrives on a lot, and the game deems it necessary to send other sims to that lot.  The sequence would be something like determine how many sims should show up > choose sims > choose outfits and moods for those sims > spawn and render them.  Under the hood, the game engine would be calling all kinds of data and running various calculations to make that happen, but since I don't know anything about software development, that's about as far as I can go.

My point is that if you have a broken mod, or if the game has a bug, that's involved with one of these steps, you might see the process breaking at exactly the same point in the sequence like your crash logs suggest is happening.  If, say, your "no weird outfits" mod is the issue, the sequence would fail during the generation of a sim's outfit, and you could actually see the same processes leading up to that error.  But I don't know what each category ID means, so I can't tell you exactly what's happening, just that it looks like the same sequence of events, in terms of what the game engine is doing, is happening each time.

Feel free to come back whenever you have time.  I'll be here.

[dslepenk · Accepted solution]

@puzzlezaddict I found a solution! 

Basically I just stopped playing Sims for a while due to the crashing, but during this time I remembered that when I got the new expansion pack I also used Sims 4 Studio to update my mods. I had updated my skins to make them compatible with the recent update, but after this update the crashes began. 

I went back to the original versions of the skin files and re-downloaded those instead and the crashes have since stopped. It looks like the files which were modified using Sims 4 Studio were for some reason breaking the game. This is odd because I've never had issues using Sims 4 Studio before, but I'm glad to have finally isolated the issue!